tired of raging

lessons from a social media fast

This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. I’m skipping the podcast version this week because, after seven years of my washer and dryer being in my bathroom, we’re finally getting a laundry room! But this week is demo, and it’s too noisy to record. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

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Evening check on the bluebirds.

I gave up all social media over Lent, that traditional time of fasting and lamentation in preparation for Easter according to the Christian calendar. At first, I at least kept up with the news via 1440 emails¹, but after a week or so, I gave up even on that. Instead, I read lots of books and lots of Substack newsletters. I watched a ton of The Great British Baking Show with my family. I wrote and walked more. I was actually pretty consistent with my sitting practice². In terms of sheer time, I don’t spend a ton of it on social media, but I’ve learned over the past several weeks that it costs me more than just the actual minutes I spend on it. 

Grant is an economist at heart, so he’s always trying to explain how the world works to us in economic terms. One of the terms he is fond of is “opportunity cost.” Opportunity cost is basically the cost of a choice not taken - the trade-off cost from your decisions. If you choose to go out to a concert tonight instead of going to bed early, the opportunity cost is that you’ll likely be tired tomorrow. You have to weigh tomorrow’s fatigue against how much fun the concert will be. This Lent taught me more clearly that there is a ton of opportunity cost associated with social media use: the costs of the addictive dopamine cycle it throws me into; the cost of my declining ability to pay attention to things for longer than two minutes; the cost of the outrage cycle on my mood, spirit, relationships, energy, and motivation.

I’ve been reading The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, and if you’re going to participate in social media, I think it should be required reading. I wish I was in charge of our kids’ school because I would assign it to every parent whose kid has a smartphone. In it, Tim Wu describes how social media’s main product is our attention, and so social media companies are the attention merchants:

We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it, but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.

Social media and just the general way we do information these days incentivizes a “race to a bottomless bottom” because that is what drives our attention and our attention is what they desperately need to be able to stay (immensely) profitable.

I’m a very passionate person. I get riled up about things, and I honestly like that about myself, but over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I have a growing impatience with people that get riled up over (what I consider) silly stuff. Perhaps this has always been true of me, and I’m just now paying attention. But I think this increasing frustration has arisen out of living through the past few years of outrage cycles of boom and bust. There are plenty of things worth getting riled up about these days, but the people who are annoying me aren’t mad about the climate crisis, the prison industrial complex, the gun lobby, racial injustice, income inequality, or the long list of things that are worth our anger. They’re mad about pronouns, what women decide to do with their bodies, and people riding bikes on the golf cart path in their country clubs instead of on the sidewalk where they’re supposed to. 

But also: the rage cycle is just wearing me out. I’m sick of walking around pissed off too much of the time, and I noticed that, when I pay less attention to what’s going on out in the world (or at least the world that the attention merchants would have me pay attention to) and more attention to what’s going on at my place, there’s less to be pissed off about³. My favorite tree is just starting to bud, my daughter has perfected this vanilla buttermilk cake, my son asks me to go check the bluebird boxes for babies, I have a new little niece, the leaves are breaking down just right in the garden - enough to smother the weeds but not too much that I won’t be able to plant in them soon.

This - of course - begs the question of my privilege to be able to live in a body where I’m not daily experiencing the sort of truly rage-inducing injustices that so many of my neighbors in marginalized communities have to deal with on a daily basis. But I also have this one precious life. I’m not sure I want to spend it like a horse whose reins are controlled by corporations or even well-intentioned people jerking me from one moment to the next about what I should be pissed off about this hour. I’m also pretty sure that allowing myself to be led from one rage to the next every few days keeps me from putting in the necessary deep work required to actually impact any of the issues that keep me up at night.

This weirdly brings me to the work of The Land Institute. They are breeding new types of perennial grains to combat the many deleterious effects of modern agriculture. According to their website, “Agriculture must understand and mimic sustaining natural systems in preference over extractive industrial systems if we hope to feed our growing population without further degrading or destroying those processes upon which we depend.” Perennial grains, as opposed to modern agriculture’s reliance on annual grains, have enormous benefits: they build soil, fight erosion and compaction through their much deeper root systems, don’t require weed suppression or chemical fertilizers, and much more. Since grains make up over 70 percent of global cropland, their work to shift even some of that land to perennial production has the potential to positively impact soil and water health, farmers’ livelihoods, and hunger. Of course, indigenous people have been practice this kind of agriculture for millennia.

Our current agricultural system is a monoculture, in which a few crops are grown exclusively. This is terrible for soil health because monocultures are not natural. Nowhere in nature does a monoculture exist unless we humans have created it. Monocultures require more and more inputs in order to just survive - more water and more chemical fertilizers and weed suppressants. They are the antithesis of sustainability.

The attention merchants breed a monoculture: their algorithms get us all riled up about the same things depending on which side of the issue we’re on, and their algorithms keep our attention focused on the anger and dopamine cycle instead of the less sexy but more sustainable and impactful work that meaningful justice work requires. Movements that effect change require deep roots, like the perennial grains The Land Institute are breeding. Social media keeps our roots shallow, our work unsustainable because we’re moving so quickly from one outrage to the next, and it requires more and more of our attention and time because there are people who get paid - alot! -  to figure out how best to keep us sucked in.

To be sure, there are plenty of benefits of social media, and I’ve been thinking about those too. But so far, the opportunity cost is just too great - the costs outweigh the benefits too much. At this point anyway, I’m not strong enough to fight the attention merchants. 

I want to be more like Kernza, the first perennial wheat that The Land Institute has successfully developed, and less like the shallow-rooted commercial wheat that is everywhere, depletes top soil at alarming rates, and requires more and more inputs just to maintain the status quo. I’m tired of giving over my energy to the attention merchants and for the obvious and not-so-obvious costs that come with that exchange. I’m about to turn 42, and I want to spend the next several decades knowing how (and when) to be soft and when to get ragey. In order to figure that out for myself, I have to listen less to what the attention merchants are telling me and listen more to myself, my family and close friends, and my community, especially those human and more-than-human parts of my community that few others are paying attention to. 

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

• In this really great episode of On Being, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about how she avoids social media and limits her exposure to the news because, “I’m so reluctant to get the kinds of calluses I would need on my ears and my heart…but there is a way in which we do information now that I’m just always trying to protect my heart.” This season of On Being has been extraordinarily good IMHO.

• What the kids are saying about social media. And speaking of ditching social media, I loved reading Meg on leaving Twitter, Chris on Substack Notes (just the intro is about Notes, but the whole thing was a great pep talk for us creative types - which is all of us), and Jackie on leaving Instagram.

• Apropos of it finally feeling like spring here and being more mindful of where my attention goes is one of my favorites from Ada Limon - Instructions On Not Giving Up:

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Here’s to paying attention to our attention,

Sara

1. I’m trying to figure out a new balance between being aware of what’s going on and not being hooked by it. The morning recap from 1440 has been helpful in trying to achieve that balance.

2. I call my mindfulness/meditation/prayer/listening practice “sitting” because it helps my brain to not get so caught up in all of the shoulds - how long it should be, how often it should be, what should happen, etc.

3. To be sure, there is plenty in my literal backyard to be pissed about too, but this backyard stuff is stuff that I not only should be angry about but also have the largest opportunity to actually effect change.